Hospital Accused of Dumping Patient on Skid Row.

Kaiser Permanente is accused of dumping a 63-year-old patient in hospital gown and slipper onto the streets of skid row! And it's on tape.

The videotape, recorded Monday afternoon, shows a taxicab making a U-turn and then driving out of camera view. A few seconds later, Carol Ann Reyes appears from the direction of the cab, wandering for about three minutes in busy San Pedro Street and then on the sidewalk before a Union Rescue Mission staff member escorts her inside the nearby building.
Reyes' movements were recorded by "dumping cams" — pan-tilt security cameras mounted outside the mission's entrance. They were installed last year after the Los Angeles Police Department accused hospitals and other law enforcement agencies of dumping people on the streets of skid row in downtown Los Angeles.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-dumping23mar23,1,1193808.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

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Yes..the truth, unfortunately. I suppose, in a sense, they were no worse off than before they found their way to the hospital, but it does sound callous particularly by today's standards, doesn't it? Realize that the homeless had less status and fewer people looking out for them 40 or so years ago-and there weren't investigative reporters looking for heart rending stories, and video cams didn't exist to catch hospitals dumping patients. Think about it, however, from the doc's point of view. You're working in a "charity" type hospital full of medically indigent people and nowhere to put them once they are ready to be discharged. The ER is filled with sick people waiting for beds and the social workers are "off" for the weekend. There are few if any shelters available. The solution was to "park bench" them. BTW, there is also the well known phenomenon of the "Pop Drop". That is, when the kids want to go away for a few days and dump Mom or Dad (or both) in the Emergency Room then disappear.
Saw that many times when I was training.

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Really webtrekker? Wow - that kind of sucks for them. I suppose the homeless use urgent care and emergency room as their healthcare, so they actually would have no place to go afterwards but the streets anyhow.

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Nothing new. When I was a resident in the late 1970's
the senior physicians told us of how they used to "park bench" skid row type patients when their hospital stay was over. They would all chip in for a cab and drop the person off in a park on a bench with a bottle of wine.